Excitation-assisted inelastic processes in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

We find that inelastic collisional processes in Bose-Einstein condensates induce local variations of the mean-field interparticle interaction, and are accompanied by the creation and annihilation of elementary excitations. The physical picture is demonstrated for the case of three-body recombination in a trapped condensate. For a high trap barrier the production of high-energy trapped single-particle excitations results in a strong increase of the loss rate of atoms from the condensate.